Cloud services are touching every part of the business environment. Name any service that your in-house IT provides and chances are there is a cloud-based version for it. In fact, the number of “as a service” offers has ballooned exponentially in the past months. And so why not cloud databases?

You have certainly heard of database as a service. It is one of Oracle’s offerings. The company’s CEO, Larry Ellison, bold predicted that since database is Oracle’s biggest software business, it will also be its biggest cloud business.

Database as a service allows you to have a database online, giving you all the functionalities and capabilities of an on-premise database when you need it, where you need it. You can access an entire database instance or just a schema, or you can offer database as a service running in your own data center for your employees and other internal users.

The promise of database as a service is that you could easily cut on costs if you do it right, especially compared to setting up your own traditional database. You also get to be more agile, and you can provision and decommission a database in just minutes. It also offers you new capabilities and scalability as well. In short, database as a service gives you all the benefits and advantages that the cloud has been promising for years.

And as early as now, database as a service is drumming up a lot of interest. In fact, database as a service is seen to become a $14 billion market by 2019, according to estimates by MarketsandMarkets. And as Oracle makes its push for its new database as a service offering, you could expect to see some of their customers jump onto the bandwagon.   It may not be a total abandonment of traditional databases, but we will see more of a phased adoption. Non-critical databases and those that are used for testing would be moved to the cloud, while some stay on site.

Companies would want to have mission critical databases on dedicated servers found in their own data centers. And because of the investment in this type of system as well as security and performance, it only follows that they would opt to keep these databases on premise. But other types of databases can easily benefit from database as a service offerings, such as databases used to develop new applications or software and database used for testing. There are also production systems that are not mission-critical.

Oracle’s new database architecture certainly helps their database as service offering. Oracle Database 12c makes use of Oracle Multitenant and gives developers pluggable databases that run on a single container database. Your administrators work with that container database to upgrade, patch and backup everything. So in essence, you end up having only a few databases to manage. Another technology that benefits database as a service is the chargeback and metering functionalities, which allow you to monitor database usage and charge the user for that usage.

You have non-critical databases that you could easily move to the cloud. Call Four Cornerstone today and ask about our Oracle consulting in Dallas. Let us help you use Oracle technologies.

Photo by Oracle.